Made Smarter helps Logoshack move forward

The £1.9 million Made Smarter scheme was launched in the West Midlands in June 2021 to help manufacturing and engineering SMEs utilise new digital technologies such as AI, advanced robotics, big data and wearable technology to improve their efficiency and productivity.

The Coventry and Warwickshire Local Enterprise Partnership (CWLEP) Growth Hub is leading the one-year scheme with the region’s other Growth Hubs in Greater Birmingham and Solihull, the Black Country, Worcestershire, The Marches, and Stoke-on-Trent and Staffordshire on behalf of the West Midlands Combined Authority and the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.

The West Midlands Growth Hubs are working closely with the West Midlands Combined Authority and their strategic partners WMG, at the University of Warwick, and the Manufacturing Technology Centre (MTC) in Coventry.

Logoshack Digital, based in Stoke-on-Trent, is a digital graphic printing company producing a variety of products for business, including signs of all types and sizes, livery for a huge range of vehicles, health and safety signage, and customised workwear.

The company has been trading for around 30 years, and currently employs 20 staff at its base on the Grove Road Industrial Estate.

We speak to operations manager Lauren Davies around how Made Smarter will help fund the installation of ERP software to make the business far more efficient as a whole:

“Logoshack has grown over the 30 years we’ve been trading and we are now ready to really focus our efforts on our growth strategy over the next 18 months which includes a full Digital Transformation project.

“We recognised that modernising and digitalising our internal processes including the tracking and processing of orders would make us more efficient. At the moment, we use our database system, Excel spreadsheets and job sheets to record much of these processes, and this is done by our very experienced members of staff.

“It works for us, but training a new member of staff to get used to the processes takes time and in order to grow, hire more staff and become more efficient we need more visibility across the business and better access to data. 

“I knew about Enterprise Planning Resource (ERP) systems and how they integrate all sorts of key processes across a manufacturing businesses and felt it would be the best way to take Logoshack forward.

“I contacted Stoke-on-Trent & Staffordshire Growth Hub in the first instance, and their Made Smarter digital expert Tim Kirby got in touch with us and came to visit us on site the following week to make sure we were a good fit for Made Smarter.

“Around four weeks later, we were visited by the Manufacturing Technology Centre (MTC) and took them round our workshop. They asked us in-depth questions about our business, before agreeing that the installation of a fully-integrated Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system would be a great way to digitalise our processes across the business.

“This would include everything from order tracking, invoices, material requirements, planning, stock levels, and much more. An ERP system would automatically update all this information in real time, and we could have direct access to multiple data points across the business to make data driven decisions to drive the business forward.

“It would modernise and enhance our current processes as well as upskilling staff, and could potentially increase our efficiency by as much as 70 per cent.

“It will also make our business much more scalable – it will enable us to take on more customers and more machines in the future. This would be much harder to do without an ERP system.

“Everyone does a great job here, but our staff do work hard. The goal of having this ERP system installed is to ensure we work smarter – not harder.

“Tim helped us put together our application for a £20,000 grant from Made Smarter to enable us to purchase the software, and he was really helpful throughout the whole process.

“And we have recently found out that our application to install the ERP software has been successful, which is fantastic news.

“It’s such an exciting time for Logoshack. We are really looking forward to rolling the ERP system out across the business and seeing the benefits that it will bring. It will do wonders for our growth.”